Excellence in Commercial Management

Winner

Melissa Di Donato - SAP

Melissa joined SAP in November 2016 and was asked to turn the global ERP sales team into a fast-moving cloud based business. She has changed the team of 10 she inherited and grown it to over 500 people in 12 countries. The ERP business is now the fastest growing natively built part of SAP, and the fastest growing division in the company’s history.

Melissa has built a fully operational, global sales team across all customer segments. She helped identify and hire the team and provided training on how to attract, win and provide the service to make customers successful. She has also created a culture that is recognised as future focused: passionate, disruptive, fast-paced, innovative and successful.

Runners up

Stuart Collingwood - Anki, Inc.

Anki is a leading robotics and AI company. Founded in 2010 by Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates in San Francisco, Anki is defining a new category of consumer entertainment products through the pioneering use of technology usually confined to laboratories and research institutes.

Stuart drove the expansion of Anki into Europe in 2014 and in 2017, was instrumental in the successful introduction of Cozmo, Anki’s AI powered robot into the region. Cozmo was the best-selling toy of 2017 on Amazon in the UK and France, the UK’s best-selling premium priced toy and the UK’s best-selling toy in the forth quarter of 2017.

Instrumental to Anki’s success in Europe has been the balance of tailoring the company’s ‘go to market strategy’ to each of the European territories it operates in, whilst bringing across the unique culture of Anki from its US HQ.

Paul Fifield - UNiDAYS

UNiDAYS have never raised external capital and Paul has led the profitable revenue growth from $2m in 2014 to $40m in 2017. UNiDAYS had 90% YoY revenue growth in 2017 in the UK, with 300% YoY in the US.

In the last six months Paul has built a commercial team from 30 to 120 people across the New York, Sydney, London and Nottingham offices with senior hires from Google, Facebook and AOL.

Paul also negotiated and closed the deal with Apple in Cupertino to embed their verification technology into over 1 billion devices globally to power the Apple Music student program in 114 countries. And over the last 12 months secured global partnerships with over 100 major corporates including, Samsung, L’Oreal, Dominos, Nike and Vodafone.